Monday, April 7, 2014

Metaphysical Doubts Concerning the Existence of Modern Ukraine, a 1918 Creation of the German General Staff

News reports on the reaction in Kiev to the
reunification of the Crimean peninsula with Russia have included the
idea that some Ukrainians resent the failure of the United States or the
western European powers to intervene militarily against Russia in favor
of the new Kiev fascist government. At the same time, it appears that
Ukrainian military units have uniformly refused to fight for their
borders, their bases, their headquarters, or other strategic assets
under their control. Much of the Ukrainian army and navy located in the
Crimea has chosen rather to become part of the Russian forces. Repeated
attempts by the Yatsenyuk government in Kiev to call up reservists or
otherwise to mobilize manpower for military purposes have met with a
very meager response.

The
founding fathers of modern Ukraine: Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg
(left) and General Erich Ludendorff (right), who ruled Germany in the
name of the German General Staff in 1917-1918

What can we make of a country which refuses to fight for itself, and
at the same time, expects foreign countries to pull its chestnuts out of
the fire? The reasons may lie in the historical genesis of modern
Ukraine, which is a nation called into being during World War I, not by a
popular movement of its own people, but rather by the German military
leadership, and then propped up in recent years by the United States and
the European Union.
International attention has lately been much focused on Ukraine, but
world publics know very little of the history involved. The country
located on the Pontic step (the flatlands north of the Black Sea)
currently calling itself Ukraine has only existed for 23 years, since
the failure of the August 1991 KGB-inspired coup in Moscow. Before
that, to find something that corresponds to modern Ukraine, we must go
back to the Kievan Rus late in the first millennium of the Common Era.
This was a state set up by Vikings (called Varangians) along the Dnieper
River, which was the main inland waterway between Scandinavia in the
north and the Byzantine Empire in the South. It was here that grand
Duke Vladimir converted to Orthodox Christianity in the year 988, thus
establishing a religious tradition which continues to be decisive in
Russian history down to the present day. But Vladimir’s state did not
call itself Ukraine, considering itself rather the leading state of
Russia, which the Latin West sometimes called Ruthenia.

No Ukraine on Map Until 1918

The Kiev Rus was conquered around the middle of the 1200s by the
Mongols, and was thereafter ruled by a series of Mongol Khans. After
the Mongol power north of the Black Sea had been shaken by the victory
of the grand Duke of Moscow Dmitry Donskoi in the battle of Kulikovo on
the Don in 1380, the Mongol yoke over the Kiev region began to fall
away. By 1526, much of today’s Ukraine, including Kiev, was part of the
very large Polish Republic, which stretched from the Baltic to near the
Black Sea. Other parts of today’s Ukraine were under Moscow, while
some — including the Crimea — had been incorporated into khanates of the
Ottoman Empire, and a small corner had been taken by the emerging
Austrian Habsburgs. Little of this had changed by the time of the peace
of Westphalia in 1648. Emmanuel Bowen’s 1747 English map of Eastern
Europe calls today’s Ukraine “Little Russia” (south of “White Russia,”
today’s Byelorus) with “Red Russia” (south of the city of Lvov (Lwow in
Polish, Lviv in Ukrainian, Lemberg in German, and Leopoli in Italian);
only a very small area astride the Dnieper is labeled “Ukrain,” meaning
something like “at the border.”